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Wed. 3/7/18 3:32pm
rrg:
What a great segue. A favorite of mine, too.

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Wed. 3/7/18 3:32pm
Listener Robert:
I'm happy about surveys, Linda Lee. I'm a scientist, I've also administered market research surveys at different times in my life, so I have sympathy for anyone trying to generate data for anything. PineCone Research is a fine project of Neilsen's I'm sure, technically flawed like all of them, but what isn't? Plus I'm underemployed and can't resist answering these things at $3 a pop because they come in little chunks on a short deadline, even though I should spend my time on more lucrative extended projects with my own client.

Wed. 3/7/18 3:33pm
Cl@m_digger:
Crash! Blast from the past. I remember air guitar in that in the 4th grade?

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Wed. 3/7/18 3:33pm
Alison Porchnik:
I think you're conflating superfluous modifiers with the real deal, Irwin. Like semicolons, adverbs are the underappreciated because overused workhorses of our parts of speech. But you personally couldn't talk your way out of a paper bag without words like bigly, half-assedly, and partially, let alone truly, madly, and deeply.

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Wed. 3/7/18 4:10pm
Hoboken Jack:
I saw Cola Jet Set some years back at Popfest NYC -- they're a lot of fun!

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Wed. 3/7/18 4:11pm
caver_mike:
I definitely have the 'syndrome' referred to by Irwin. I listen to WFMU 24/7. It is playing even if everyone is asleep. And I totally agree, for me the archives provide the only good alternative when I find the on-the-air programming is not holding my interest.

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Wed. 3/7/18 4:59pm
Ken From Hyde Park:
Ken has mentioned that in some meetings with Upsala staff, no one had any paper, a strong hint that the college was in a downward slide.

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Wed. 3/7/18 4:59pm
TDK60:
I was listening in '67 when it exploded! (I was 15.) Went to the WFMU house immediately, helped run for records in the library for the DJ, who was nuts. Vince Scelsa recently said he got some of his ideas for Free Form from WBAI DJs -- Bob Fass, Larry Josephson, etc..

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:03pm
Michael 98145:
on the left coast, our free-form history goes back to the days of KRAB-fm

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:04pm
TDK60:
I can recall that DJ well. I've picked him out of an old photo of WFMU DJs sitting on the steps of the old house. (Hope to see the photo again.) Don't know his name. By "nuts" I mean he was so enthusiastic, he was sweating, hair disheveled, shirt out of his belt. Totally carried away by the music.

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:10pm
TDK60:
KPFA in Bay Area was ahead of most. 1949. But it may not have been "free form" till the Sixties. Before that it was likely human interest stuff, poetry, politics, specialty music shows -- jazz, blues, etc.

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:10pm
Webhamster Henry:
This is a new song from Sunflower Bean. They just played as the "backup band" on the Independent Spirit Awards/

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:11pm
Linda Lee:
wonder how many of the ladies were on air?

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:12pm
Irwin:
Yes, that's Vin in the lower right. At the time this photo was taken, I was not yet born.

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:13pm
TDK60:
Yes! That's the photo Michael 98145! And the culprit is the fellow in the back towards the right with the hat. That's him. He was wild. He insisted that the next Grateful Dead album was going to be free. [Nope.] Half a century ago and it still inspires me.

Born in Germany in 1920, Charles Bukowski was dragged during adolescence to California by his impoverished parents, who raised him on a regimen of physical and emotional abuse. As a kid he suffered bad acne, causing schoolmates to torment the timid, awkward youngster. The horrible truth that pain is relentless and people mostly worthless came on early and set in firmly. But two discoveries changed everything: booze and the written word. Bukowski had a genius for both: the former went in prodigiously, the latter came out abundantly.

What followed were several decades of factory jobs and post office drudgery, underscoring failed attempts to make it as an author. This period was marked by long stretches of hard drinking, short bursts of romantic foment, and rare moments of creative encouragement. He stopped writing for a decade (his "ten-year drunk"). By the late 1960s he'd stripped away the vestiges of art damage from his early work and distilled the everyday ass-kickings, arrests and inebriated fornication into a growing body of fearless poems and prose.

Bukowski was celebrated by outsider-fixated literati, the French, and rock critics. Filmmakers began to take note of this sub-blue collar demi-Beat with no pretense toward redemption, transcendence or politics. He was an ugly mofo with nothing to declare but genius. Versions of Bukowski, played by Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon belched and mumbled across theater screens. Enter money, which bought more liquor and more time to write. Celebs posed for pictures with him as if they were old comrades.

In 1980, Bukowski gave his last public reading, recorded on video. In one scene he recites a desperate letter from a fan—a perhaps typical dispatch, veering between insecurity and hero-baiting—to a crowd of hipster scum. The audience laughs on cue at high irony and low mockery, using one fan's naive fulsomeness to revel in their own bullyboy stupidity. The poet obliges them without the slightest evident pleasure or interest. The incident makes Bukowski a thumbnail for "crazy drunk writer dude"—for those who value such delusions. It's hard to recognize the disciplined artist who hammered out startlingly moving literature. Read a few of the eulogies for women he loved, his reveries on the everyday things he saw as beautiful. They're good. They're useful.

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Wed. 3/7/18 5:18pm
Linda Lee:
sure was hoping to hear the song about Hank. not bad!